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Razer Acquires Ouya's Storefront and Technical Team
An anonymous reader writes: The Ouya Android-based gaming console was one of Kickstarter's biggest successes — and one of the biggest letdowns for all the backers. The console never really took off, and the company behind it has limped along over the past couple years. Until today. Razer has now acquired the Ouya technical team, as well as their online storefront — but not the console hardware itself. Razer intends to dump of all these new resources into its Forge TV product, also an Android game console. "Razer went so far as to kick a little sand in the face of the little-console-that-couldn't—by advertising its own Forge microconsole as a 'more advanced' system and telling Ouya owners that they will receive 'a clear path of migration' to buy the company's current $100, AndroidTV-compatible box." The fate of Ouya's hardware is not explicitly mentioned, but the news article suggests it is simply "discontinued."
They promised the revolution, a home console for everyone, freedom from the big publishers and for everyone to develop.
When I finally got mine, I turned it on and the first thing it did was ask for my credit card number. Tried to skip it but it was not possible.
I left it collecting dust ever since. So much for revolution and freedom, not going to miss it.
Except that it is. People treating it as something else doesn't change the fact that you are not purchasing a finished product. You are making a small-scale investment with the promise of specific rewards once the project completes.
Sometimes that works out. Other times it doesn't, and it behooves anyone who's contributing to a Kickstarter project to do a bit of research about the company or individuals behind it, how feasible their plan is, and overall how risky it is.
Sorry, but Kung Fury was worth every single penny.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
It's also better than anything that Hollywood has produced in the past 40 years.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I don't actually think I've ever seen a kickstarter that I would qualify as an investment. For me, an investment is something where I give somebody $x and at a future point in time there's a reasonable chance that I could end up with cash or negotiables worth $x+y. Of course, there's always some risk that the investment doesn't work out and I end up with $x-y or even when x=y and you get $0. But there should be a chance of actually increasing your money.
For every kickstarter project I've seen, the buy in amount is very close, if not exactly equal to the retail price of the product. Because of this, you're almost always better off waiting until they actually have the product completed, and then just buying it when you know that it's actually worth the money. I don't think I've ever seen a kickstarter where they give you a significant discount on the retail value of the item. If there was a reasonable chance that you could get the product for half price, for investing in the product in the early stages, then I could see a lot of incentive to pitch in. But there's no way I'm paying full price for an item that doesn't exist yet and that I may never actually get.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Remember: "Man pays $50 and gets what he paid for!" doesn't make for very exciting news. The vast majority of Kickstarters work relatively well, perhaps with some delays, but nothing too serious.
Certain projects categories are a bit more volatile than others. Software and gadgets are among the most risky, which happens to be the categories of primary interest to slashdotters. In comparison, board games are an extremely safe bet. In the vast majority of cases the creator already has a print & play version available. Kickstarting is becoming positively routine in the board games world, and that's despite having one of the most famous kickstarter screw ups (The Doom that Came to Atlantic City).
I've had my Ouya for a little over 2 years, and it's probably the longest amount of fun I've gotten out of $100 in a long time. Even if it ended today, which it won't, I will still have been happy with my purchase.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
I disagree about Steam Machines. There are real problems I have that I hope Steam Machines solves. I want a fully powered, gaming PC that just works, but doesn’t lock me down in what I can do with it.
- I want the benefits of mass production commodities and be able to buy a good PC gaming machine off-the-shelf for a lower price.
- I’m tired of spending so much time building my own custom PC and doing OS installations.
- I’m sick of Microsoft charging me many times more than everybody else for a Windows license because I didn’t buy a pre-configured machine from an OEM.
- I’m sick of Windows blue screening and corrupting my EFI boot partitions so my dual boots won’t work.
- I’m sick of Windows nagging me about turning on Secure Boot. I don’t want it.
- I’m sick of big giant PC towers that take up massive space and don’t fit well in home theater cabinets (or anywhere else).
- I’m sick of loud PC fans and the unnecessarily high power consumption and heat
- I want a gaming PC that is fully utilized for games, not loaded down with needless background processes sucking up CPU and RAM
- Hardware driver updates for Windows is such a chore.
- Windows mostly broke DirectX/DirectInput compatibility. I’m so sick of having to get xce360 working and re-configured for every single game I buy now.
- I hate it that Fraps doesn’t work any more with non-fullscreen mode starting in Windows 8
- I don’t want to be pushed to Windows Store
Well, with investments that promise cash returns, it's very easy to categorize the return. I can't speak for others, but when I've kickstarted a game or other project, I expect that what I'm getting is going to exceed the value of the money I'm putting in, even if that value is in the form of largely intangible enjoyment. Sometimes I'm wrong about that, and in at least one case spectacularly so (I played the beta for about ten minutes, and concluded that it was utter crap that I had zero further interest in), but that was my poor estimate.
And part of why it works is that there are people who (at least for some projects) who value the proposed project enough that they put forward the money ahead of time. Maybe some of them are foolishly overestimating the value, but that's how it goes sometimes. Sure, you can wait until it's actually produced, but then you're not one of those people who wants it enough to do so - and I certainly wouldn't argue that you should do anything but wait and see, in that case, because there is indeed risk that the project could fail and you'd be out that money with nothing to show for it.
I'd say it's more of an investment than anything, given all that - it's not a donation if you're expecting/hoping for something tangible in return that is at least commensurate in value, with a degree of risk that you might wind up with nothing at all. You're just investing in the possibility of getting a copy of a particular proposed game/console/etc, rather than getting a certain amount of monetary profit back.
I have funded 40+ kickstarts. One flaked out and cost me the whole $20, at least 6 had delays greater than 50% of the estimated delivery time. But more than half nailed it and I got what I purchased.
I backed the Ouya, and kept careful track of what they were up to. It was a good idea, it was well executed. It worked... But anyone who guarantees you a successful venture in the gaming console market is a liar. It's an unpredictable space. Just look at the money that Microsoft and Sony have had to dump into it to be stay successful (red-ring-of-death? blue-light-of-death? expensive). Look at the success of the Wii on technically inferior hardware (for the day).
What the Ouya people missed was the difficulty in porting many games designed around finger-swipes to use classic thumb controllers. The conversion rate of hit Android games over to the Ouya platform wasn't nearly what they hoped for.
The dream, a gaming console selling $5 games of "good Android quality" is a good dream. I've no regrets for backing it.
They delivered the product as promised
Well, no. Not really. They promised an open and hackable platform. But they didn't deliver that. They released a shitty and broken platform. Many units overheat. All original controllers were shit, they had to do a second run. And the "recovery" is shit. It's implemented at the same level as the OS, so if you ruin your OS, your Ouya is really and truly bricked. Nobody has figured out how to get JTAG on it. USB keyboards become controller #1 so nothing works until you unpair them and the keypad (which will have become controller #2) and then re-pair the keypad. Pairing of PS3 controllers was never reliable. Etc etc. Ouya is a turd, they failed miserably, and it's not clear why anyone would bother to pick up the pieces.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"